She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.--Toni Morrison, Beloved

I'll never be ready. Yet at the same time, you always want to reach the end. You can't fly to a destination and linger in the air. I want to reach the end of this thing, and I feel terrible about it.--Kaui Hart Hemmings, The Descendants

Jeremy will take her like the Angel itself, in his joyless weasel-worded come-along, and Roger will be forgotten, an amusing maniac, but with no place in the rationalized power-ritual that will be the coming peace. She will take her husband's orders, she will become a domestic bureaucrat, a junior partner, and remember Roger, if at all, as a mistake thank God she didn't make…. Oh, he feels a raving fit coming on—how the bloody hell can he survive without her? She is the British warm that protects his stooping shoulders, and the wintering sparrow he holds inside his hands. She is his deepest innocence in spaces of bough and hay before wishes were given a separate name to warn that they might not come true, and his lithe Parisian daughter of joy, beneath the eternal mirror, forswearing perfumes, capeskin to the armpits, all that is too easy, for his impoverishment and more worthy love.You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you've found life. I'm no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are 'yours' and which are 'mine.' It's past sorting out. We're both being someone new now, someone incredible.--Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

And even though I still felt miserable, and knew that I was, most likely, ugly, it was the first time she ever talked to me like I was something besides my mother's white child. All my life I'd been told what to believe about politics, coloreds, being a girl. But with Constantine's thumb pressed in my hand, I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.--Kathryn Stockett, The Help

I guess that's what the kid feels - She looks so sad down there wandering Ophelialike in bare feet among thunders.--Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it. --Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.--F.Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful And The Damned

"I'm sorry," I say. "I didn't give you everything you wanted. I wasn't everything you wanted. You were everything I wanted."--Kaui Hart Hemmings, The Descendants

Just remember: If one bird carried every grain of sand, grain by grain, across the ocean, by the time he got them all on the other side, that would only be the beginning of eternity.--Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

There are plenty of good reasons for fighting...but no good reason to ever hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive....it's that part of an imbecile that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly.--Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night